Alex was a solitary person, he had spent a month in the hall of Convocation, but he had not even made a single friend. He had kept to his schedule as he drowned himself in books and study. Alex envisioned that people who actually just decided to focus on their education and went on to universities lived like this. It was just study upon study upon study.
The first things he needed understanding of was the basics of the three topics, which most of the time had to be just the identification of the raw materials that was required for them. In just the first week alone, Alex had memorized thousands upon thousands of individual plants, herbs, fruits, moss, leaves, grass, trees and sea weeds that had a multitude of different effects. Alchemy had the most information to be absorbed, but it was mainly just a matter era of being able to cram and identifying everything he's had to learn.
Alex had two cultivation paths, and if not just for the normal cultivation of Qi alone, his spirit cultivation would afford him great advancements and evolution to his mental faculties, acuity, and versatility. Which is to say all cultivators and spirit kings were geniuses by virtue of their Cultivation.
There were three volumes of biology that Alex had to memorize, the first had to deal with plants, the second had to deal with beasts of all kind. And the third had to deal with what the book had labeled as the treasures of heaven and earth. This were materials that were not naturally in existence like plants or even demonic beasts, but rather were Born as a result of a plethora of natural phenomenon. More often than not this treasures of heaven an earth would be found on other worlds or pocket dimensions that overlooked with earth, heck some were even listed as being inky capable of existing beyond the boundaries of life, which is to say you can only find it in the land of the dead.
But that was just alchemy, before going into the understanding of the techniques behind it, what you needed to do was be capable of recognizing it's materials and their effects. But even with the sheer amount of knowledge he had to master and digest, Alex had only taken a week to have a light memorization of them down, and used another three days to fully comprehend everything. With that done, the next would have been him moving on to practical applications, but he got greedy, rather than just focusing on one alone, Alex wanted to dabble with the others, so he went after Blacksmith next.
The amount of information he needed to assimilate and digest from blacksmithing wasn't as much as alchemy or arrays, in fact it had the shortest amount of information to be memorized. There were thousands of metallic ores, but not up to the dozens of thousands that was for plants.
And just like with alchemy, it taught him how to identify them, how to find them, the kind of environment one needed to pay attention to know there was an ore vein beneath them. It only had two volumes, and both were not as much as those from alchemy, but just like alchemy; it had him memorize the natural metallic ores, and then the natural beasts whose bones, tusks, claws and fangs can be in forging weapons or other sort of effects.
And then next he memorized about the treasures of heaven and earth that had to do with blacksmithing. Funny enough, many of the information Alex had learnt correlated with most of the info from alchemy, so it was quite easy for him to remember those animals and plants that could actually provide multiple profession materials in both alchemy and blacksmithing.
Of the three professions, Blacksmithing was the most physically demanding, alchemy demanded lot's of resources and a great deal of talent, and arrays required both talent, resources, and a shit load of mental strength. Which was why there were less array masters than blacksmiths and alchemists, and less alchemists than blacksmiths.
After mastering the basic knowledge from blacksmithing, something that Alex knew Anya had studied a bit in the past on the behest of his dad, he turned his attention to arrays. Alex had more patience than Anya, even though Alex was not allowed to cultivate which was stupid no matter how many times he thought about it, his father knew Alex was more suited to arrays than Anya. According to what his dad had said, most arrays worked best in the hands of blacksmiths.
The blacksmith vocation was a whole lot more complicated and important than the other two. Another name for blacksmiths were Qi engineers. Basically they built modern technology as it is, and it was in tandem with array masters that they were able to incorporate great effects into the creations, like forging a ship that could travel and tear through space, traveling through spatial tunnels to arrive in another location. It was a symbiotic operation that has been going for s very long time.
After digesting the basic blacksmith knowledge that had to do memorizing, he jumped to arrays. He already had a basic foundation on arrays, but when he saw the basic knowledge in front of him, he realized that his knowledge would barely be considered a drop in the ocean. You can compare the simple text books found in a village library to what the Wudang sect had to offer. So had he had to scrap everything he had learnt and started from the bottom, building a proper foundation.
Arrays also required memorization, there were twelve basic arrays, and nine elemental arrays that served as the foundation blocks for the beginner knowledge.
The twelve basic arrays were the: [PUSH, PULL, HIDE, REVEAL, DEFEND, ATTACK, SLEEP, AWAKE, SPEED, SLOW, GROW, DECAY] Each of this basic arrays had simple strokes that they were formed from, however once you begin to move those strokes and symbols, even perfectly incorporating the other basic arrays, you can create new combinations and new arrays, causing a variety of new effects. For example the push, pull, speed and a couple of elemental combination arrays formed the basis for the arrays that made it possible for a spatial gate to exist and connect from one tunnel to another.
The nine element arrays included: [FIRE, WATER, EARTH, AIR, LIGHTNING, DARK, LIGHT, LIFE, DEATH] the elemental arrays can be combined too, and in the process new elements can be born. Fire and water gave you steam, dark, light, and earth combined gave you gravity, whilst fire, air and lightening gave you plasma. Alex was sure he would have lots of time to experiment in the future.
He had to thoroughly study the basic and elemental arrays until he could actual draw them in his sleep, and that alone took him a while two weeks. When combined with the time he used in learning alchemy and blacksmithing knowledge, obviously arrays were a lot harder. As it stands he only had two weeks before he had to go back and refine his martial arts for the competition that was six weeks away. He wanted to get started on getting some resources, but to do that he would contribution points.
There were some sect missions and tasks he could carry out to be able to get the points he needed, however those will be time consuming and he would not have as much time as needed to experiment. So instead he would focus on the advance basic knowledge, especially on blacksmithing, since blacksmithing would provide him some of the materials he would need for his arrays, and even help him forge a furnace for his alchemy.
It wasn't too bad of an idea, knowledge is power after all, and after the competition regardless of whatever rank he gets, he would be able to at least get a few contribution points for participating. With that out of the way, he would be able to focus on his vocations.
Besides Alex didn't think he would lose, after he just advanced to the ninth stage of the open Meridian realm yesterday, and he didn't have to do anything other than just living his life. Besides how dangerous or hard can a competition between a few kids be.